Alabama

Find joy in your seed-bearing, edible bananas

Q: My banana tree, which I got from a clump in an old garden in the area, has been producing fruit for three or four years, thanks to your Gulf Coast banana-growing instructions. I was told that it was an edible banana. But every year the fruits are a disappointment. The pulp tastes creamy and good, but it is full of seeds! What am I doing wrong?

Bill Finch, Press-RegisterBanana âtreesâ are common in Mobile, but sweet, edible banana fruit â like this bunch growing in Oakleigh â is a rare spectacle. Even more rare, though, is a tree that grows edible bananas full of viable seeds.

A: Wow, a lot of banana breeders would wonder what you are doing right! While purely ornamental varieties of bananas often produce seeds (and virtually inedible fruit), a genuinely edible banana that produces viable seeds is a treasured rarity.

It may be your plant (or others like it) could someday play a key role in revitalizing the world’s bananas.

Sounds like I’m making too much of your banana? Well, maybe not, and here’s why:

Bananas are fruits, and fruits are the wombs that carry the seed to start a new generation of plants. Apples have seeds, peaches and plums have pit-like seeds, and wild blackberries have tee-nincey seeds that get stuck in your teeth.

But most edible bananas, if you stop to think about it long enough, don’t produce seeds. That’s because bananas have been grown and manipulated by people for so long, we’ve tricked them into producing fruits that have an abundance of the fruity pulp that protects the seed, but without a single healthy seed to show for it.

Humans have succeeded in doing that with other popular fruits. Many figs no longer produce viable seed, and seedless grapes and melons (relatively recent introductions to horticulture) have pretty well transformed the way we consume those fruits. But I can’t think of any fruit other than bananas that has been so uniformly seedless for so many thousands of years.

Much as that may be a delight to the consumer, it presents a real challenge to growers. A new generation of bananas can be raised only by cloning a new plant that is identical to the mother plant. Most plants (unlike, say, people) are fairly easy to clone: If you have a clump of bananas, each stem that arises is a perfect clone of the banana stem you started with.

But what happens if a disease begins to ravage the banana population, and you want to find a strain of banana that isn’t as susceptible to the diseases that affect the mother plant? How do you raise a new generation of bananas that isn’t absolutely identical to the population that came before, and thus has the possibility of being more resistant to disease? You need to reverse-engineer thousands of years of breeding, and find edible bananas that produce at least a few seeds.

And that’s the great problem facing banana growers. A host of new diseases, including Panama disease and black sigatoka, have begun to wipe out banana plantations worldwide. Plant breeders are in a race against time to find the very few banana plants that still have some capability to produce seeds. If they find the right ones, they can breed these seedy varieties together, and produce new generations of bananas. Most of this new generation won’t be any better than their parents, and some may be a lot worse, neither edible nor particularly disease resistant.

But if the breeders know what they’re doing, and they carefully evaluate thousands of seedlings over a few generations, they may one day find a choice new banana variety that will save the day for banana lovers worldwide.

It would have to be a might special seedling: It would need to be seedless (even though it came from seedy parents); it would need to have developed genetic mutations that made it less susceptible to two or three of the most common diseases; and it would need to taste good and be easy to grow and harvest. It’s a one-in-a-million kind of thing, but plant breeders are up for that kind of challenge.

First, though, they need a good stock of bananas that for one reason or another are still capable of producing seed. And that’s why your banana may prove valuable.

Save those seeds, sow them in pots, or find someone who will (wouldn’t you know it, germinating banana seeds is kind of tricky, so you’ll need to read up on it). Let’s find out if any of them are viable — that is, will they actually germinate and produce seedlings?

If they do, let’s see if we can’t find a place to plant them out and evaluate them as they mature. We may not only find seedlings that produce edible fruit and disease-resistant plants, we may also find bananas that are better adapted to northern Gulf Coast growing conditions.

I welcome observations from other gardeners whose bananas produce seeds, but remember, we’re looking for EDIBLE bananas. If your bananas produce seeds, but the fruit makes you gag, you have one of the common and naturally seedy ornamental varieties. No need to worry yourself or anyone else with them.

Keep me posted on what you find, oh Great Keepers of the Banana Flame.